


in tenebris

by notthebees



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Existential Despair, Gen, minor alternative to canon but canon-adjacent, there's still comfort to be found in others even when things are bleak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 10:38:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15555894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notthebees/pseuds/notthebees
Summary: After being rebuffed by Dr. Stanley, Collins makes a second attempt to see Goodsir. The two men end up revealing far more of the fears that haunt them than they intend, but vulnerability opens the door for compassion and acceptance. (Or: They both need a hug so badly from anyone, and deserve a measure of mutual comfort.)





	in tenebris

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't read Dan Simmons's book and also I'm uhhhhh stupid so if anything is wrong, I apologize! (Title is from Hardy's poems In Tenebris I and II, which are on-theme here & also good stuff on their own.)

Goodsir is hunched over the Netsilik dictionary he’s been compiling by lamplight at odd hours, when he hears the telltale heavy, slow tread of a man afflicted descending the wooden stairs, followed by Henry Collins poking his shaggy head into the sick bay and hesitantly knocking his knuckles against the open door.

“Dr. Goodsir, sir?”

“Mr. Collins, come in.” Goodsir sets down his pen and beckons Collins into the light with a concerned frown. “It’s late. Has something happened?”

Collins freezes in the door frame. “Oh—no. I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour. I can go, if you’re turning in for the night.”

Goodsir shakes his head, though, and gives him a smile he hopes is reassuring. “You need never apologize, Mr. Collins. Come sit down. Are you unwell?” It’s an inane inquiry and Goodsir knows it: none of the men on _Erebus_ is well—in fact they’re all far more ill than they can probably imagine—but it slips out carelessly, and Goodsir is tired. He’s tired of receiving men beset by mystifying ailments of which he can pretty well guess the cause but for which he can offer only weak, palliative measures, and no satisfying explanations. He’s tired of the way they look at him—vague embarrassment that their bodies are falling to pieces about them, and tentative hope, quickly smothered, that he might have the answer—and of his judgment as a surgeon withheld over and over ( _What is wrong with you is, you’re dying, incrementally, and so am I, and so is every man here_ ). He’s so tired, and he says a silent hopeless prayer that whatever it is that plagues Collins at this hour so close to midnight is something he might be capable of fixing. “Come in, Mr. Collins,” he repeats. “You’re always welcome here. Why don’t you sit down, then.”

Collins nods in apparent gratitude and shuffles inside, although he does not sit in the chair Goodsir offers him, opting instead to remain close to the exit with his back to the wall, shoulders hunched forward.

Goodsir likes Collins—at least, he likes Collins as well as he likes any of the men on _Erebus_. The hulking diver struck him from the start as good-natured and exuberant amongst the others out on the ice, although surprisingly shy in conversation on the few occasions they’d had cause to speak face-to-face—a bashfulness in private that seemed so at odds with the man’s ruddy, half-wild appearance. There’s something distinctly withdrawn about him now, though—although that might be attributable to the long winter, which dampens everyone’s spirits to some extent—and he looks pale, too—although that might just be the dim, flickering light of the single lamp. Collins has always seemed _solid_ , even amongst such a hardy crew, which lends a gravity to his after-hours visit that has Goodsir anxious.

“Sir, I know you’re a doctor—” Goodsir doesn’t correct him, as the distinction between doctor and surgeon seems hopelessly lost on the entire crew, save for himself and the ship’s actual doctor—“and not a priest, and this might not be within your...realm of professional expertise, begging your pardon—” Goodsir’s heart sinks as he studies the lines on Collins’s face and the dark bags beneath his eyes—“only there’s no priest aboard, sir.” Collins attempts a laugh, and it’s a hollow, frightened sound.

Goodsir smiles gently. “You might tell me anyway, Mr. Collins. If nothing else, I might…” _What?_ What tangible comfort might he offer this man? Nothing of value, certainly. Nothing real. “I might understand.”

Collins nods again, removing his knit cap and fidgeting with it for a moment before sighing quietly. “Very well.” He doesn’t immediately continue, but Goodsir knows from experience that a man will always eventually get to what ails him, given patience and sufficient space in which he can uncoil his tangled thoughts.

But Collins instead folds in on himself even further, sliding down the wall into a crouch without warning, shrinking physically in some mix of fear and anguish and humiliation before the prospect of baring his thoughts even to one as unassuming as Goodsir—who flinches in alarm.

Goodsir isn’t sure what to do. Mute inaction feels foolish, though sitting back down at his desk would be little better, and so he circles ‘round the table and crouches a body’s length from Collins, just as he would so as not to spook Fagin when the cat would slink into the infirmary. This must look absurd too, he realizes, but enough of his routine of late would appear so incomprehensible outside of its surreal context that he supposes it makes as much sense as anything else these days. Looking at the man curled miserably before him, Goodsir is struck with the sudden aching impulse to reach for him in pity and affection. Collins is a large man—broad shoulders, big hands, open face—but those hands are twitching restlessly, and that face is cracking apart like melting sea ice over the depthless void, and into that emptiness Goodsir draws closer. “Henry,” he ventures softly, pressing his right hand over his breast. “I promise you, whatever it is, you have my confidence. And my earnest attention.”

Collins inhales deeply through his nose. “I shouldn’t have come—shouldn’t have bothered you in the first place. I came looking for you yesterday, but found Dr. Stanley instead, and he...he found no cause for concern, but I...” he trails off. “I’m sorry. You’re very busy.”

Goodsir has edged close enough to lay a hand softly over Collins’s wrist. “Tell me. Please. I will help you in any way in can.”

When Collins speaks at last, his voice is so taut and quiet that Goodsir has to crane yet further forward from his kneeling position, hand still resting lightly on the man’s wrist, in order to hear. “I told Doctor Stanley that I’m in a bad way. And I am. I’m not...well, it’s not my muscles or my bones, it’s just...the way I feel. I feel brittle. Jagged, yes? But fragile. I—that sounds mad, I know.”

Goodsir shakes his head. “No, not at all. These winters are trying.”

“There’s something wrong with me.”

“Tell me,” Goodsir coaxes with a small squeeze of Collins’s hand.

“It’s bad. _I’m_ bad. I’m bad almost all the time now, but so long as I’m busy, I can keep it at bay—and I stay busy, as much as I can. I told Doctor Stanley: I work as much as they'll let me, I take on every job, but it’s...it’s getting worse. It’s become unbearable.”

“What is?”

“All of it,” Collins’s voice breaks. “Everything. I don’t know. I’m sorry, doctor, I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” He looks at his hands.

Goodsir’s knees have begun to protest, so he shifts to sit beside Collins on the floor, his back to the wall, their shoulders almost touching. Holed up here in the half-light of the belly of the listing ship, now with nothing to alleviate or distract him from the pall of dread that threatens to descend upon him day and night, Goodsir finds himself without a word of buoyant consolation to offer. They sit there without speaking for a bit, each lost in his own private gloom, the silence broken only by an occasional creak of plank or screeching gust of wind outside. Goodsir’s mind strains for any scrap of professional solace to be grasped and bestowed, but, finding none, he can only sigh deeply. “Things are bad, aren’t they, Collins?”

“I know I need to be steady—that the others need me steady—and I know I have no right to collapse like this. It’s _contemptible_ —no, don’t tell me otherwise. I know it’s worse for others, and that I ought to be grateful I’m still alive when many have met with such terrible fates, but I—” Collins’s breathing has become terribly shaky, but even so it takes Goodsir a moment to realize that the man is crying: _Collins_ , affable Collins, dependable Collins. Even Goodsir knows that diving demands maintaining iron grip over one’s nerves under terrible pressure, and yet here this diver is, hunched and disconsolate on the floor of the infirmary late at night, wild-eyed and desperate and stricken by some private immitigable grief he cannot even articulate.

“I wake during the night—but it’s all night now, isn’t it? I wake up and I don’t know what time it is, only that it’s dark, and I don’t open my eyes; I just...lie there, and I don’t even feel like I’m real. I lie there and wish none of it were real. I feel like I’m down in the fire hole with no means of climbing out, and nothing but fathoms of dark water beneath me, and I don’t know whether I’m more afraid of remaining trapped in that deep well, or of breaking through the ice and into the frigid sea. My mind’s bad, doctor. And I don’t know which is worse: that this _isn’t_ my mind, but I’m losing that which _is_ —that someday soon I won’t even be me anymore—that I’ll just be...something else. Or that this is all there is of me, and it’s dissolving. Just sloughing off li-like ash. And when it’s gone there won’t be anything there at all. Not something else: nothing at all.

“So I take up tasks that aren’t mine and stay busy as much as I can because so long as I’m moving and consumed by work, I can keep ahead of...it. But I’m—it’s as though I’m getting slower, and I can’t focus like I could, and _it’s_ ever faster and stickier—like tar, like a lake of tar that grows and grows until it covers the whole earth. And I can’t stay ahead of it nor get out. It’s like trying to outrun the pack ice in autumn, even as it overtakes you and seals you up within it, and I’m tired. It’s unbearable, doctor. I’m so afraid—of turning foul, like this, and of weakening or sullying the collective somehow—and I just want it to stop. Everything. I’m sorry. I know it sounds like nonsense and hysteria, and you must think me a coward, and loathsome, as you ought. I suppose I…” he falters. “I suppose I came to see you because...I don’t know why. I felt like I ought to. I don’t know what I thought I wanted.”

Having run out of words, Collins lapses into silence, and Goodsir opens and shuts his mouth, as if by doing so he might draw words of wisdom out of the air, as the right whale opens its terrible maw to draw in a churning cloud of brit. Collins’s fragmented admission, the most Goodsir has ever heard him say at once, has hooked something beneath Goodsir’s breast and is dragging it out into the space between them. Why else does Goodsir keep his vigil down here late into the night, cataloguing his knowledge and recording his observations from this endless sea of ice, if not for that implacable sense of unease that something unspeakable is out there, moving slowly, tirelessly, inexorably toward them?

_I’m so afraid_ , he thinks, and realizes too late he must have said it aloud, because Collins starts, wiping roughly at his cheeks and nose.

“I’m sorry,” Collins says again. “I had no right to—I just thought—you’re a doctor, but—no, it wasn’t fair of me to come down here and unravel like this. I’m so sorry.”

Collins makes to stand up, but Goodsir exclaims, “No—no, please— _I’m_ sorry. Please. I’m—I’m afraid too. All the time. I’m sorry—you can leave if you like, but I’m—” he gestures helplessly toward himself, sitting half-sprawled on the wooden floor. “You can stay,” he says. Collins hesitates, then settles back against the wall.

“I know what you wish for,” Goodsir mumbles, “or at least, I think I do. I think I wish for the same thing, or something similar. Probably.” Impossibly weary and already regretting the oncoming confession, he rests his head against the wall behind him and shuts his eyes. “None of us is ever alone here, not properly; I’ve fairly forgotten what privacy means...and yet I often feel...so terribly isolated, in every sense. It’s curious how for years I’ve spent nearly my every waking moment within sneezing distance of my fellow man, but when I crawl into my bunk to sleep, what I long for is...well, not anything particular, I suppose. It’s more of a feeling to conjure up, wistful-like...a feeling of not being quite so alone—of being _known_ by someone or something and—well, unalone.” He stumbles to a halt, unable to bring himself to say, _a feeling of being held _. “There’s comfort in—in that dream, or idea. Almost.” This is appallingly unprofessional, and Goodsir is mortified even as the words leave his mouth, not sure what he should have said instead, but fairly certain that he’s making a right blithering fool (or worse) of himself. Though, to be fair, Collins is _weeping_ , and so in a sense it only seems fair that Goodsir ought to lay bare his own most shameful lapses in fortitude—the disgraceful deficiency at the heart of him, certain to baffle (if not disgust) Collins and grievously embarrass them both—if only to even the scales.__

____

Rather than recoil, though, Collins appears to digest what Goodsir has said, and then croaks, with the ghost of pained smile, “I can’t bear it. The others can. They _do_. I don’t know why I can’t.”

____

Goodsir has no counter to that, so he switches tack. “I could give you something that would put you out of your head, which might provide you some relief. But it would do so only briefly. And then it would spit you back out into the horror and darkness in which you now thrash, and you would not thank me for it. Given time it would consume you, carve you out from the inside, mind-first.” Collins makes a sound, but Goodsir shakes his head. “I understand if it’s oblivion you crave—if, even temporary, it is preferable to this...this black hell from which you cannot extricate yourself. But I—you must understand—my duty to you as a surgeon, I—it would not help you, do you understand? I would not administer the means of your destruction, Collins, no matter how dearly you may wish it. I cannot. I’m sorry.”

____

“I know.”

____

“Things will be different. When the sun returns, and the ice releases us.”

____

“And how many of us will be left by then?”

____

“You mustn’t—”

____

“Can you really imagine it? Being back? Not surviving, not returning, but _living_ out a whole life somewhere? I can’t, Dr. Goodsir. I’ve tried. If that future exists, I won’t be in it.”

____

“Please—”

____

“Returning home won’t bring them back. Even if we find the Passage, it won’t bring back the ones we’ve already lost. Billy Orren, and...Sir John...and all the others. And the rest of us, even if we return—I—I’ll be—I _am_ —wrong, now. Hideously broken, and...wrong. Warped, and corroded. Even if we return, we can’t go back to what we were, or at least I can’t. I want to close my eyes, and leave all of this. Just dissolve and float away. But I don’t want this—the way I am _now_ —to have been all I ever was. I know that sounds mad. I know I’m going mad, or that I’m mad already, and I’m...there’s something wrong about me that can’t be fixed...but I…” Collins’s hands resume their bunching and rolling of his knit hat. “I want to be a whole person when the end with my name on it finds me. I don’t want to be _wrong_ like this, when—when it happens.” He fights down a ragged sob. “I can’t hold out for as long as it will take to get out this place—I’m not even sure I want to—but I want to be...whole. I don’t want to be like this.”

____

“Don’t,” Goodsir begs, reaching to still Collins’s wringing hands. “You mustn’t—you mustn’t say that. We’ll sail out come springtime. Things will be better, and all of this will be a distant dream.”

____

“If I plunge through that hole from which there’s no coming back—if the tar closes over my head, is that it? Will I be an awful tar creature for eternity? Will what remains of me be...bad? Like _this_? Will I be warped and...and malformed, and filthy, as I am now? Or could I get it back, somehow—be what I once was, or who I thought I was? Will there be something else—the true me, Henry Collins, whatever I am—that will exist after it’s all over? Do you think there’s something else?”

____

Goodsir frowns, trying to understand. “Do you mean—are you asking me if you have a soul, Mr. Collins?”

____

“I-I suppose,” he stammers slowly. “Yes. Something like that.”

____

Goodsir withdraws his hand from Collins’s and stares into his own lap. There are some things, he’s found, a man simply can’t bear to look one of his fellows in the face to talk about. Some things must be spoken slantwise, lest an open glance betray fear or worse. Some truths can only be whispered to the empty air.

____

“I’ve attended to the dying,” Goodsir begins heavily. “I’ve watched them pass. Men, boys, in this very room. On these occasions, once it has become clear that I can do no more for a body, then I have done what I can to put the mind at rest. You are not the first to ask me what becomes of the spirit after death.” Goodsir has never been dishonest in these cases, although he might have bestowed assurances of angelic choirs and the delights of Paradise with more certainty than he truly possessed at the time; surely, he tells himself, God would not begrudge frightened men this small mercy in their final hours. So long as Collins is here, though, flaying his heart raw in front of him, Goodsir feels the man deserves nothing less and nothing more than stark, unadorned honesty. He’s quiet for a long moment, choosing his words with care.

____

“You ask me whether I believe in the soul.” A pause. “I do.”

____

Collins exhales quietly.

“I don’t...I don’t _know_ , of course, what becomes of it, but I do believe that you, Collins—Henry—that there is an...an immutable quality, or essence, call it a soul, call it what you like—that is unsullied and incorruptible. It cannot dissolve as the body can. Nor fracture as the mind might. It simply is.”

____

When Goodsir musters the nerve to look at Collins fully, he finds the man huddled silently beside him, face contorted, tears working their way haphazardly down his cheeks. It’s enough to make Goodsir’s chest constrict, and, hardly trusting himself to speak without giving himself away, he bridges the narrow gap between them, pressing a palm gently to the man’s back. “Is that—” he swallows—“Is that no comfort to you?”

____

Collins nods fervently. “No—yes. It is. Thank you. I’m sorry. I’m—” he shakes his head furiously, voice a tight whisper. “I’m sorry.”

____

“You needn’t apologize.” Goodsir squeezes his shoulder, and in response Collins reaches across his own chest to lay his hand over Goodsir’s. Neither man speaks, though Collins continues to shudder, clutching Goodsir’s fingers as though they form his sole anchor to the world, great racking sobs tearing up from his throat.

____

There is nothing else Goodsir can do, and so he presses himself to Collins’s side, keenly aware—in spite of himself and the bleakness of all they both have revealed—of how good it feels just to touch a person like this, to sit so with anyone—as though by naming his demons he has briefly banished them from the room, and in the ensuing quiet this gentle human contact has granted a momentary respite from the horror unfurling around him.

____

“I’m sorry,” Collins whispers periodically. “I’m sorry.”

____

“You’re alright,” Goodsir murmurs softly. But of course Collins isn’t alright, and hasn’t been for some time, and he might never be alright again—Goodsir might never be alright again—and so Goodsir shakes his head almost imperceptibly and corrects himself: “Well, you’re not alright, but you are whole.”

____

Collins stills at that, but his face is all anguish. “I’m broken. I can feel it all splintering. Mind and body. And I don’t want—I don’t want that to be it. I don’t want to just...splinter like that, and be swept into that black void. I don’t want to disappear.” He sobs once more, and Goodsir can do nothing but shift slightly around and pull him bodily into a full embrace, the man's tear-streaked face pressed into the crook of Goodsir’s neck.

____

“You won’t,” Goodsir insists, running a hand up and down Collins’s back. “I don’t know what will happen to us. It’s possible we will die, it’s true. We might go mad. But I swear to you, Henry, on my life, I do believe there is some kernel at the heart of you that is good and indestructible and will persist beyond all that. And that _is_ you, Henry, and you are whole. You are whole.”

____

Collins snakes his arms around Goodsir, clinging desperately to the surgeon’s coat. How much times passes like that—Goodsir wrapped around Collins with a hand tangled into his hair, thankful that Collins can’t see his own tears—Goodsir can’t say. But no one disturbs them, and it’s warm and so good to be held; and eventually Collins’s dry sobs subside into shuddering breaths, and the fist ‘round Goodsir’s heart unclenches slightly at the feel of Collins’s dark curls pressed against his cheek.

____

When Collins speaks at last, the sound is muffled. “I hope that if any of us makes it back, doctor, that it’s you.”

____

“You can call me Harry. And I’m not really a doctor, I’m a surgeon. Or I was. But people keep dying, and I can’t stop them; I can’t help; I can’t do anything, and I’m not—I’m not anything out here.”

____

Collins draws away, takes Goodsir’s hand, squeezes it. “You’re the best of us. Truly. You’re going to live, and happily. You deserve it. A good life.”

____

It’s Goodsir’s turn to slump against Collins, who rests his own head on Goodsir’s, and the two of them lean together on the floor—weight and counterweight—breathing quietly in the darkness.

____

_It’s nice_ , Goodsir thinks, almost guiltily. Collins is warm, and it’s comfortable despite the cold and the dreary surroundings—holding him like this and being held—and it’s comfort _ing_ , even if he can offer neither answers nor cure nor permanent relief to Collins, and Collins can do no more for him.

____

“I’m sorry,” Goodsir whispers. “I shouldn’t have said such things, especially not to you, especially not when you came seeking aid, and instead I—I wish I could put things right.”

____

Collins answers, muffled, “Can’t be fixed. Too far gone.” _Him? Or Goodsir? Or all of them?_ “You’re a good man though, doctor, and I’m thankful, and I wish I could help you.”

____

“You’d be surprised,” Goodsir huffs. “You’re good, Henry Collins. If that brings you any measure of peace. No matter what becomes of you. You’re good and whole, and I’d like it if you stayed here for a bit.”

____

“I’d like to stay, if you’ll have me.”

____

Goodsir lets his eyes slip shut. “Thank you.”

____

“Thank you. Harry.”

____

__Outside the ship the wind howls over the endless ice, and the stars shine but dimly, and the sun doesn’t rise on the frozen wastes; but inside the small room in which the two men huddle quietly together, the only sound is that of steady breathing, and, in that room, for a time, there is peace._ _

**Author's Note:**

> I would very much like to imagine that Goodsir and Collins make it home and THINGS GET BETTER ~~and a tender relationship develops and they kiss and are life partners~~ but even if they don't  & everyone dies anyway...maybe things wouldn't end QUITE so awfully for Collins if he had gotten some human compassion earlier?
> 
> Which I guess is to say, they're uhhh probably still gonna die but Collins hopefully won't descend into insanity first, and maybe he and Goodsir comfort each other about their inevitable end. Silver linings?? I'll take anything at this point.


End file.
